[Soc-2012-dev] AssimpFBX - Week 9 Report

[Alexander Gessler]

Hi all,

tl;dr version
=============

Worked on animation import.


What I did this week:
=====================

- Worked on animation conversion. I got some first tests working, but
there's much stuff left on this topic.

- Investigated how to rework the fbx exporter to achieve a good fbx
roundtrip.


Plan for next week:
===================

-Animations, animations, animations. Target is to have animation import
(incl. skinning) working in Blender at the end of the next week.


Problems/Open Issues
=====================

I'm not sure yet what the best strategy to fix the fbx import /export
roundtrip is - it is not very nice that one side of the party is in C++,
the other in Python.

What I'm considering is to hack-fix the exporter in the last week of
GSoC (in order to achieve the original goal) and to start rewriting it
from scratch afterwards - in C++ and within assimp, which means lots of
the infrastructure code could be shared between importer and exporter
and the code would largely be symmetric.

I think this is the only way to keep the fbx pipeline maintainable in
future.

For a proper roundtrip, we also need some kind of test suite for it. I
have some ideas how to do this, I'll discuss that with Tom during the
next week.